JeffreyGong_DESMA9

      Perhaps one of the most formative experiences of my youth was going to a exhibit on the human body, with hundreds of displays filled with all of the organs and tissues that make up us all. When I found that being faced with the considerably grosser displays at the exhibition ignited little disgust in me, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in the life sciences. The fact that such intricate systems, like the tensegrity structures described by Donald Ingber, naturally evolved by natural selection never fails to amaze me. A controversial exhibit on the human body. Taken from BBC       I had not seriously considered the implications of human anatomy as art before this week lecture's-- to me, the exhibition I attended was purely a matter of scientific curiosity. But now I recognize the importance of human anatomy and imaging technologies like X-rays and MRI. As Silvia Casini wrote in an essay about MRI, MRI imaging "functions as a windo...

 The first event I attended was the watch party of the documentary, "The Origami Revolution." I must admit, I've never had any interest in origami whatsoever. I've never had the patience to follow so many instructions just to end up with a deeply uninteresting crane. I couldn't have imagined the amount of applications that this ancient art actually had. It really goes to show how seemingly simple concepts or ideas can blossom into all sorts of fascinating complications. From this... Image Credit: The Spruce Crafts To this. Image Credit: TechCrunch     In particular, I was fascinated by the fact that any 3D object could be folded from a sheet of paper, without even making any cuts or tears. (Perhaps if the three-dimensional messenger from Edwin Abbott's Flatland had understood this, they could have used origami to introduce the inhabitants of Flatland to the third dimension?) It's still difficult for me to comprehend how one would go about proving such a f...

      This week, we read about how industrialization has enabled art to be easily mass produced and distributed to more people than ever before. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin argued that because of industrialization, art had lost its "aura"-- with the ability to easily mass produce copies, the value of the original has diminished. While I feel that, as Douglas Davis wrote in his essay, this didn't exactly happen, I do feel while the great artists of the past still command respect by common people even today, who go out of their way to see their work in person even though they could just as easily view their work for free on the Internet, modern artists generally operate in obscurity to anyone not in the art world. Common people are often flabbergasted by the amount artists charge on their commissions, thinking, "Well, it's just drawing, how hard can it be?" With industrialization and the inception of so...

      As an aspiring science fiction writer, reading Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott was a deeply engaging look at the blending of art and mathematics. I was struck by how the author used the principles of geometry to not only imagine a rational two-dimensional and one-dimensional world, but also create entire functioning societies revolving around the unique challenges of such limited existences. From the simple mathematical idea of a flat plane, Abbott imagined a civilization with its own unique culture, history, and politics, all following logically from the math of two-dimensionality. As different as Flatland is from our world, Abbott also made it eerily familiar by his depiction of Flatland's rejection of the idea of higher dimensions, ultimately reflecting the flaws of our own society in the seemingly alien mirror of Flatland. In my own stories, I love to incorporate all sorts of complicated technologies and arcane magic systems, but Abbott showed me that even simp...

    CP Snow’s concept of two cultures and his lamentation of the divide between them is quite relevant  to me as an aspiring writer of science fiction. Although I am currently studying for a career in the   sciences, I’ve always been interested in both the rigorous, empirical search for universal truth   represented by the hard sciences and the subjective search for human truth represented by literature  and humanities. To me, the perfect marriage of those searches is science fiction, and in my childhood   I devoured works by writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. I admired how they could write  stories that were both grounded in real science and capable of raising difficult questions about what it  meant to be human.  Arthur C. Clarke Taken from biography.com Isaac Asimov Taken from biography.com     Unfortunately, my experience in school was much like what Snow described, “a gulf o...